Anne Chow steps onto the stage at a recent Texas Women's Foundation Leadership Forum with the confidence of a leader, tested, tried and proven over three decades blazing a trail in corporate life.
The electrical engineer was in her 20s when she started her career at AT&T as a network engineer in Bedminster, New Jersey. Over the course of her 32-plus years, she held 17 different roles, including product/P&L management, strategy and planning, customer service, international operations, direct and indirect sales and marketing.
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WATCH HEREThe company moved her to North Texas in 2015 and in 2019, promoted her to a high-profile position, and in the process, made history.
"I knew that I was the first woman to be CEO of AT&T Business, but what I did not know was that I would become the first woman of color CEO in all of AT&T history," Chow said.
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SIGN UP A year later, the pandemic came and the 24/7 pressure to keep people and businesses connected. Little did she know at the time that the challenge would prove to be the end of one chapter and the start of another.
"Those three years with the emergence of the pandemic, the fact that we provided critical and essential services to first responders, to small businesses, to global multinational companies, to ensuring that the economy was connected, ensuring that people's lives were connected. There could be no greater, I would say, experience than the one that I had just had, at least in the industry. It wasn't a matter of not believing that I couldn't go, quote unquote, higher. I just found that I didn't want to," she said.
So after 32 years at AT&T, Chow announced her retirement. She left in August 2022 at the age of 56, but she wasn't ready to leave the workforce. She just wanted her work to look and feel different.
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"Just like everything else, leadership has to evolve with the times. And I never wanted to be one of those people who stayed past their prime, who was one of those people that was blocking others. And I knew that I was not going to be there for another five, ten years. And when I realized that, I said to myself, it's time to rewire, not retire - and set forth on this epic adventure of re-creating myself as you will, transforming my career in the context of what I wanted this next part of my life to be about," she said.
REWIREMENT
CEO Anne Chow became The Rewired CEO. She's a board director, national best-selling author, inspirational speaker and professor.
"And for the first time in 32 years, I realized that I could have a greater impact outside of the company because I could develop a portfolio approach to my life as opposed to working for one employer, which brought me incredible success, achievement and fulfillment during those 30-plus years. But it was clearly time for me," she said. "So, as I went through that thought process, I started thinking about, and this harkens to the fact that I'm an engineer, I started building a framework for myself."
That framework revolved around four T's:
- Transformation: Chow loves business strategy and transformation.
- Thought Leadership: She wanted to evolve her identity to be seen as a thought leader around leadership. It led to her 2026 book Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion.
- Talent: "One of my superpowers is my ability to connect with and develop relationships with others. And I found the most fulfillment while I was working in corporate by helping other people realize their fullest potential. I loved mentoring people. I loved sponsoring high performance. I loved helping people develop into their potential. I loved helping people see their potential. And so I wanted to make sure that there was an aspect of my requirement that still enabled me to have access to talent." Chow is Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
- Treasure: "And that is really about wanting to make sure that I'm spending time and energy and effort on the things and people I treasure the most. And one big confession here is that I had spent three-plus decades ignoring myself from a health perspective, like so many women and leaders do. And I committed to myself that I needed to get my act together in the environment, that I had to treat my health as a priority."
In the three years since she rewired, Chow, a wife, mother of two girls, a daughter, sister and aunt, has learned joy is different than happiness and fulfillment is not the same as success and achievement.
"My career and my life just keep getting better because they are more meaningful and they're more aligned with what I feel I was put on this earth to do, which is to help others realize their fullest potential, right? I want to leave this place better than whence I came," she said.
ORIGIN STORY
That desire to make people and places better is rooted in Chow's upbringing as a second-generation American. Her parents came from their native country of Taiwan after meeting through a matchmaker.
"And my mom said to my dad, 'I will only marry you if we go to America.' And she had this vision. She had this view that America was the land where hope lived. And they moved and got married here in the United States," Chow said.
She and her brother were born in the Midwest to parents who "lived their whole lives in pursuit of the American dream, pouring everything into myself and my little brother. They believed that this was the land where you were going and what you could achieve and what you could contribute was not bound by where you came from."
As children of immigrants, her parents were adamant that she and her brother assimilate as much as possible. That meant academics, the arts, service projects and sports.
At the young age of 4, she started piano lessons and at age 10, she was accepted into and enrolled in the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Her parents encouraged her to get involved in a diverse range of experiences from Girl Scouts (she remains a lifetime member to this day) to athletics and community activities. They believed that anything worth doing was worth doing to the best of your abilities.
Yet, Chow says, "For me growing up, I felt this tension between not being fully sort of Taiwanese or Asian enough, but also not being fully American enough because there were very few people who look like me in the towns that we lived in."
Her origin story would prove to be a key driver in her leadership journey.
"When I was young and then also I would say through college as well as the early parts of my career, I just had this consciousness of fit and belonging. And these were not the words at the time, but feeling included or feeling excluded. And so I had this hyper consciousness around how I related to people, how others related to me," she said. "And it was not until later on in my career, I realized that some of those foundational lessons from being a second-generation American, from having such an emphasis on learning and education, from having such an emphasis on service and paying it forward were actually incredible attributes to carry forward into leadership roles."
That upbringing was the foundation of the servant leader Chow would become.
Experiences every step of the way, including 26 bosses, pushed her closer to the kind of leader she wanted to be and shaped her philosophy of leading bigger. She came to see and believe that no job, no work, no goal can be achieved without the collaboration and involvement of others. Individual journeys are made richer by sharing them. And, the power of inclusion can elevate the work, the workforce and the workplace.
PURPOSEFULLY IMPACTFUL PERSON
Looking back on her career, Chow says she always felt an obligation and responsibility to make sure she would do the best she possibly could to demonstrate that she should not be the only and certainly should not be the last.
The opportunities "just reinforced for me what my parents' dreams were all about, which is that this is in fact the land of opportunity It is a combination of both science and serendipity and very, very intentional choices that you make throughout your life that paint that foundation, that set that foundation for your contributions throughout your life," she said.
As Chow continues on her rewired career, the former VIP now considers herself a PIP, a purposefully impactful person, rewired to be engaged, present and grateful.
"I love it. I really do. You know, the big difference here is that everything that I'm involved in today, maybe 99 percent of it, is because I choose to be involved in it," she said.
